Microsoft surprised developers on Monday by releasing a test version of a new Windows file system.

The company made the test version of the system, called WinFS, available to Microsoft Developer Network subscribers. The software giant had originally planned to release WinFS — which it said would make for better desktop file searching — as part of the next version of Windows, once called Longhorn but now known as Vista. However, roughly a year ago, Microsoft announced it was pulling WinFS out of Longhorn in order to let the OS ship in 2006. Of WinFS, the company said only that it would be in beta form by the time Longhorn shipped.

That left many with the impression that a test version of the file system would not come until next year. However, a WinFS developer said he would not consider the long-delayed system to be early.

"I would certainly not characterize WinFS as being ahead of schedule," said Quentin Clark, director of programme management for the new file system.

Originally touting WinFS as the means that would enable better desktop file searching in Longhorn, Microsoft is now focusing on the benefits of the file system as a means for desktop applications to harness information stored in a common repository. For example, rather than entering shipping information in an ecommerce application, with WinFS, someone could simply click on his or her own card in a central address book and the information would be transferred to the appropriate place, Clark said.

In a note to developers on MSDN, Microsoft called WinFS a tool that makes it easier to find information stored on both local PCs and across networks.

The test version is designed to let developers start getting a sense of how the file system will work and start thinking about ways they could use the common repository capability.

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Microsoft is taking its real-time collaboration strategy to the next level with the release of a new set of tools and software code designed to facilitate collaboration across a broad array of enterprise applications.

The new Presence Controls designed for Microsoft Office Live Communications Server 2005 will deliver pervasive capabilities to help individuals work together more effectively, said Microsoft product manager Ed Simnett.

"The idea behind real-time collaboration is to let those working in teams in an office, or worldwide, communicate better," he said. "Our strategy is to make that collaboration part of the office infrastructure." Simnett predicted that presence-aware applications will become ubiquitous in the enterprise within five years.

In pushing presence-aware software to facilitate communications with coworkers around the network or at remote locations, Microsoft and its software partners are attempting to move beyond instant messaging to include real-time communications in applications ranging from customer-relationship management to enterprise-resource planning, said Simnett.

"There is a big advantage in not having to close one application to establish communications in another," he explained. "We are helping developers make any application a communications application."

Role Models

The new Presence Controls essentially are software tools earmarked for Microsoft Visual Studio developers wanting to embed presence-aware capabilities into applications so they can provide contact-status information around a network. Users of these presence-aware applications can quickly launch instant-messaging conversations or telephone calls to connect and collaborate with colleagues.

In addition to facilitating real-time collaboration, Presence Controls give developers the ability to assign roles to enterprise workers. The Role Agent Module for Microsoft Office Live Communications Server 2005, for example, provides one kind of implementation of role-based instant messaging and presence.

This module gives developers a way to assign a role name, such as "customer-service representative," to a group of people. Requests for an instant-messaging session with any role can be dispatched to any or all of the available members in that group.

Quick, Effective Collaboration

"It is essential in today's business environment that people have the ability to quickly and effectively collaborate with coworkers, partners and customers in real time within the context of day-to-day business processes," said Zig Serafin, general manager for the real-time collaboration group at Microsoft.

"With Live Communications Server, we are providing an extensible platform with rich federation capabilities and tools that help partners more easily incorporate real-time collaboration functionality into applications that today's workforces use most, and that span internal and cross-company business processes," he said.

Among the partners currently integrating these collaboration features in their software are BrightWork, K2.net, Meridio Inc., OSIsoft Inc., Siebel Systems and Singularity. Siebel currently offers collaboration software integrated with the controls to help businesses capture, share and access information in real time, Simnett said.

Those wanting to learn more about the Presence Controls and sample some of the modules can visit the Microsoft Office Live Communications Server site.

Via News Factor

 

 

by Mike Otey

 The number of new features in SQL Server 2005 is almost overwhelming. Of all the new features, the one that has drawn the most attention from the media and DBAs alike is the integration of the CLR with the SQL Server database engine, and I can understand why. CLR integration brings with it a host of new capabilities as well as a huge potential for misuse. However, CLR integration is off by default, so you don't need to worry about it unless you decide to use it.

     While the inclusion of the CLR is an important step for Microsoft and SQL Server, it's not the most important change in the 2005 release. Instead, Business Intelligence (BI) is the big story in SQL Server 2005. At the PASS conference in 2004, Bill Baker introduced the themes of Integrate, Analyze, and Report to describe SQL Server 2005's BI functionality. Virtually every aspect of these BI areas has been either completely revamped, as with Integration Services, or significantly enhanced, as with Analysis Services and Reporting Services.

     Arguably, the biggest changes are up front, in SQL Server Integration Services (SSIS). Completely redesigned from the ground up, the new SSIS is completely different from Data Transformation Services (DTS), which it replaces. DTS was a useful tool, but it had problems with scalability and transportability. SSIS isn't just a data-transfer tool -- it's a complete workflow engine. Its performance is significantly improved, and new tasks enable looping, package execution, and enhanced flow control. The new Package Configurations feature lets you easily pass in runtime variables from the registry, XML documents, parent packages, or environment variables to make your SSIS packages more flexible and easily transportable.

The core Analysis Services component has also received many important improvements and new features. In Analysis Services 2005, OLAP cubes use the new Unified Dimensional Model (UDM), which combines the strength of OLAP and relational storage, enabling you to create a custom balance between the performance and data storage your Analysis Services cubes use. Other additions include proactive caching for cube deployment, MDX enhancements, and a new XML for Analysis (XML/A) query language. Microsoft also added several new data-mining models that provide more options for data trending and prediction.

     Changes on the reporting end of BI are every bit as significant as those in integration and analysis. The biggest change in reporting is the inclusion of Reporting Services, which provides an enterprise-oriented infrastructure that you can use to design and deploy reports across the organization. In addition, the new Report Builder feature brings the ability to design reports that are completely integrated with Reporting Services to the end user.

     At 5 years in the making, it's no surprise that SQL Server 2005 is the most feature-rich release since SQL Server 7.0 -- maybe the most feature-packed release ever. Though it contains many important enhancements, the BI portion of the 2005 release has the lion's share of the changes and new features. Many businesses were slow to adopt the BI features of the earlier SQL Server releases, but that won't be the case this time. SQL Server 2005 has broadened the definition of BI to incorporate information integration and presentation capabilities that go beyond analytical processing. The nature of the BI changes in SQL Server 2005 enable a wide cross-section of organizations to quickly put them to use. Despite the slew of new features in other areas of the product, SQL Server 2005 could easily be known as "the BI release."

 

 

The long-awaited update to Oracle's (Quote, Chart) Collaboration Suite, version 10g, is now available, representing the company's first big step into enterprise content management (ECM).

Collaboration Suite 10g, which previously went under the code name Tsunami, is the third generation of the product and includes two new features: Content Services 10g and Oracle Workspaces.

Officials said the update tackles and addresses the problems casual users have encountered with managing the unstructured data like spreadsheets and PowerPoint presentations on the network with co-workers.

Content Services is the successor to Oracle Files and was designed with service-oriented architectures (define) in mind, said Rich Buchheim, Oracle content product and strategy senior director. This way, information can be stored once and used in a variety of ways throughout the enterprise, whether through an application or browser.

"It really is, if not the first, certainly one of the first content management solutions that can be truly deployed across the entire enterprise," he said.

The suite ties that structured and unstructured data along with a number of collaboration tools through Workspace to make it easier for customers to work together, whether they are in the cubicle down the hall of company headquarters or at a remote office in another country.

It ties together documents with calendaring, instant messaging, e-mails, web conferencing and discussion forums and is tightly linked with its other software products -- in this case Oracle Database 10g and Oracle Application Server 10g -- to provide a centralized area for all company documents.

That provides simplicity over Microsoft's (Quote, Chart) SharePoint Server, which Oracle is targeting as its primary competitor in the space, according to Bob Shimp, Oracle vice president of technology marketing.

Rather than individual SharePoint servers separated by project teams, he said, everything is located under one Oracle database that ensures everyone on the network is using the same information while reducing business risks like regulatory compliance, security and reliability.

"We're going to go quite aggressively against Microsoft SharePoint, we're going to go out there and take this market and convince our customers that they don't want to have these highly distributed systems," Shimp said.

Oracle finds itself coming late to the ECM space. There are already a number of ECM providers with established products, companies like IBM (Quote, Chart), EMC (Quote, Chart), Interwoven (Quote, Chart) and FileNet (Quote, Chart).

Officials doesn't see it that way, however, saying they will be working from the IT departments of existing customers and out into the marketplace as the suite gains popularity.

Cost for the suite will run companies $60 per named user, or $45 for individual components of the suite, for a perpetual license. Support and maintenance costs are figured separately.

Via Internet News

 

 

Based on the perceived instability and incompleteness of Visual Studio 2005 and Visual Studio Team System, developers have posted a request to delay the release of the product on the beta feedback center. Instead of a release, they would prefer a third beta with a release to follow several months later.

Less than two hours after the recommendation was posted to the product feedback center, it was resolved as "Won't Fix" with an assurance that the product will be ready to go.

Via The ServerSide.Net

 

9Rays has released a new TreeView product for ASP.NET. FlyTreeView is a dynamic treeview control with native ASP.NET control, features visual designers, and native .NET DataBinding to any ADO.NET source (DataSet, DataReader, arrays, and IList implementations, etc.).

In addition, the new product offers drag-and-drop operations, full ASP.NET viewstate support, highly customizable styles and behaviors, XML node sources to enable load on demand, FlyNodeSet control to provide on demand nodes renderring and loading (ex. file system), checkboxes, multiple postback events (select, deselect, expand, collapse, check, uncheck), server side handling of all client events, comprehensive client object model, context menu, and flexible licensing options.

Founded in 1998, 9Rays.Net brings together together several groups of expert developers. Each group offers its own unique product line. These highly-skilled professionals have joined their efforts to achieve better marketing results and to provide the best quality of their products.

9Rays.Net has gained wide experience on the tools and components market, developing high-quality products for the following platforms: Microsoft. NET (Windows.Forms and ASP.Net), Borland Delphi, C++ Builder, and ActiveX. The company's primary product focus is on development of .Net tools and components compatible with Visual Studio .Net, C# Builder, Delphi.Net and other IDEs for .Net Framework.

For further information please visit: www.9rays.net.

 

Making the appropriate selection of an ASP to ASP.NET migration strategy is not always clear cut. As a developer, you would probably be tempted to rewrite the entire web application in Microsoft .NET from scratch. However, your manager might not be as enthusiastic as you are to this idea. The application is already in production and satisfies the requirements. Why follow a more risky and costly path if it is possible to start extending the application in .NET and at the same time preserving an investment in the legacy ASP code? Especially if a complete migration can be achieved gradually in a number of evolutionary migration steps, with every step resolving a concrete migration-justifiable problem.

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he Microsoft^® Dynamic Systems Initiative (DSI) provides a roadmap for simplifying enterprise software development, deployment, and management. Current Microsoft products and technologies that support the DSI model for system management include Automated Deployment Services, Microsoft Operations Manager (MOM) 2005, Systems Management Server (SMS) 2003, Virtual Server 2005, and Windows Server^™ Update Services. Future technologies expected to extend the DSI model include Visual Studio^® 2005 Team System and the System Definition Model (SDM) planned for a future version of Windows Server. (For more information about DSI, see Dynamic Systems Initiative.)

With these key DSI and SDM deliverables planned for the future, developers need manageable apps right now. Fortunately, the current version of Windows^® Management Instrumentation (WMI) is able to satisfy many manageability requirements. In this article I'll demonstrate how WMI provides a first step towards DSI-style system management. I will develop a WMI-aware monitoring solution you can use to instrument your ASP.NET applications, and I'll introduce you to the capabilities of MOM 2005 that allow you to then monitor these instrumented applications.

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The upcoming release of the .NET 2.0 framework brings many new enhancements to the CLR and the C# and VB.NET languages, and with the availability of Beta2, it seems like an appropriate time to dive into the .NET 2.0 framework and see what’s cooking. Since .NET is a platform that supports multiple languages my approach with each new release has been to review what the CLR has to offer first, since it is the foundation for all languages, and then review what is common for the languages I use the most, which are C# and VB.NET. Last, I review each language on its own to see how each enhancement can solve the particular shortfalls of the previous version and how the new enhancements can improve the clarity and efficiency of my code. Now with this solid understanding behind me I can make better decisions as to which language or languages to use on my next project.

CLR Enhancements
The new enhancement that stands out the most in terms of enterprise computing is the 64-bit version of the .NET framework. This version of the framework allows you to take full advantage of the underlying 64-bit hardware platform without having to deal with the differences between 32-bit and 64-bit hardware platforms. What this means is if you created a 32-bit application that doesn’t rely on floating-point numbers or native code you can simply compile your code using the 64-bit compiler, for your language of choice, and begin running your application on a Windows 2003 SP1 or Windows XP 64-bit operating system with no modifications.
   
Generics are another enhancement that I will keep under the CLR umbrella due to the CLS compliance to them. Generics provide developers with a way to create type-safe data structures consisting of classes and interfaces that are data-type agnostic. This means that when you declare your type-safe data structure you put a placeholder for the agnostic type and during instance creation you specify the actual type used. An example of creating a custom generic type can be seen in Listing 1. One of the strengths you can see right away with Generics is their use in collections where you were previously forced to use the System.Object data type no matter what type you passed in. This of course incurred boxing for value types which let to a performance hit. To help us out Microsoft has created the System.Collections.Generic namespace. It provides an assortment of commonly used generic collections that you can use so you don’t have to create type-safe collections by hand unless you want to.
   
Friend assemblies are another new enhancement that enable developers to expose C# internal and VB.NET friend decorated types and methods to multiple assemblies. In the past this was accomplished by either making the type public, which exposed the type to all assemblies, or decorating each type or method with the StrongNameIdentity- Permission attribute, which was time consuming and error prone. With friend assemblies, adding the [assembly:InternalsVisibleTo(“AssemB, PublicKeyToken= 32ab9ba32e0a51a1” )] attribute to the assembly allows all friend-specified types or methods to be visible in the named assembly.

Read More | Symbian Developers Journal

 

Microsoft has release more than thirty new SharePoint applications. Application types include Help Desk, Performance Reviews, Employee Timesheet and Scheduling, Change Management, and Travel Request. All of the applications are downloadable free from TechNet.

The applications are site templates that can be uploaded to a SharePoint site template gallery.   You can read more and download the applications from they’re website at http://www.microsoft.com/technet/prodtechnol/sppt/wssapps/default.mspx

Via TheServerSide.Net

 

Recently I shared my vision for the value of Live Linux distributions that minimize the obstacles for learning open source software development. This came as an epiphany for us at the SNAP Development Center after we released SNAPPIX version 0.7. In the beginning, we only wanted to build a showcase for SNAP Platform, but once we had a working copy, the possibilities became instantly obvious. This was also true when I heard about a new Live Linux CD featuring Mono. This article expands on this premise, reviews Mono Live and shares an interview I conducted with the originator of the CD, Joseph Hill. It is my hope that this Live Linux CD plays an important role in the adoption and spread of the Mono project (as I have previously written here).

Introduction

Mono Live was released on May 24, 2005. Although there are several Live Linux CDs with Mono, they are all based on Knoppix and use KDE as the default Linux desktop. This distribution is based on the Ubuntu Live Linux CD. In many ways, the outstanding experience available from the Mono Live CD is made possible from Ubuntu. Since Ubuntu features GNOME as the default desktop, it only follows that due to Mono's heavy reliance on Gtk+, Mono Live would provide superior functionality. The current version of Mono Live includes Mono, version 1.1.7 and all of the key platform components, including a broad assortment of Mono Gtk-sharp based GUI applications, ASP.NET applications, and the software infrastructure to run the application. In addition to the core mono-based tools MonoDevelop, MonoDoc, and xsp, the Live CD also includes Postgres, pgAdmin III, and Glade.

Mono Live also has a major bonus. When the Mono Live CD is inserted into a MS Windows machine, it automatically provides the ability to install the complete Mono for Windows installation package. Thus, Mono Live serves a dual purpose, first as a complete Live Linux distribution, and second as a complete Mono Windows distribution.

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Start Time: Friday, August 05, 2005 9:00 AM (GMT-08:00) Pacific Time (US & Canada)
End Time: Friday, August 05, 2005 10:00 AM (GMT-08:00) Pacific Time (US & Canada)

This webcast looks at some of the advanced features of  Visual Studio Tools for Office – VSTO, such as the new data cache available in documents, the ability to add controls at runtime, and the options available for deploying your VSTO solutions.  

 

Presenter: Ron Cundiff, Developer Community Champion, Microsoft Corporation

Ron Cundiff is the developer community champion supporting the Mid-America district and he has worked within the information technology industry for nearly ten years. Before joining Microsoft in December 2002, he worked for an independent software vendor and was responsible for the design and implementation of a global, online, commodities exchange system. He lives with his wife, Lisa, in Memphis, TN, and has two children, Kayla and Ryan